Since the late 2000s, creators and consumers of popular music have expressed renewed interest in music distributed through cassettes. The perseverance of the cassette serves as a lesson regarding our overemphasis on novelty and disruption in histories of media technologies. Without discounting its resurgence, this study considers how in the 1980s the cassette first came to the fore both as a format of music release and a symbol of intimate connection through music. The cassette redefined what it meant to share recorded music, yet to do so it needed communities into whose stories of themselves it could play. Within independent rock music culture, the cassette became both a pivotal medium of distribution and a motif in some of that subculture's defining dramas.